Saturday, July 10, 2010

Force Plain Text in Apple's Mail.app

You ever get an email that looks like this?

It's one of life's enduring mysteries why people who stylize their email text don't care whether it's readable for people on the other end. Sometimes I think everyone but me is secretly a graphics designer and they're deliberately sending me messages in the worst possible fonts and styles just to mess with my head.

Well, instead of going all tin foil and dropping off the face of the earth, there's another solution to this problem. If you're using Mail in OS X, open your terminal and enter the following command:

defaults write com.apple.mail PreferPlainText -bool TRUE

When you quit and relaunch Mail, you will now see that your emails received have been magically transformed to plain text. Wonderful, readable plain text. If you insist on seeing the original HTML version, just hit Command + ].

Of course, if you want to switch back to the original default, just change TRUE in the command above to FALSE and run it again.